In Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, Wharton professor and economist Dr. Corinne Low unpacks the challenges and opportunities facing women, and how they can thrive at work and at home. The following excerpt from her book highlights research that challenges common misconceptions about women at work, including their competitiveness and negotiation skills.
My first day as a consultant happened to fall on the day of an annual women’s summit, and so I and the other female new hires were invited to join the event. The firm had brought in a “gender empowerment” speaker who mostly seemed focused on addressing the mistakes women made in the workplace. She went around the room critiquing body language, urging us not to sit with our legs tucked under our bodies “like little girls,” and imploring us to stop phrasing everything as a question and quit apologizing so much. As she spoke about the idea of “power dressing,” she singled out another new hire, Steph, who I had just met, but with whom I already felt an instant connection. Unlike so many of the other new hires, who were trying desperately to fit in, Steph seemed comfortable being herself, and I found her to be a breath of fresh air.
The speaker asked Steph to stand up so the whole room could inspect her. She was dressed in a white button-down and pink khakis that looked J.Crew-catalog-effortless. The speaker practically gasped at the sight. “You can’t wear pink pants! No one will take you seriously,” she admonished Steph in front of hundreds of her new colleagues. “And your hair should be pulled back, off your face!” Steph, who’d previously seemed unflappable to me, was clearly shocked and embarrassed. We sat in silence as the speaker went on to describe the fundamentals of a proper business wardrobe and how women could be treated the same as men if only we changed our behavior enough.
We all got the message that day, but it wasn’t one of empowerment—it was that we couldn’t bring our full selves to work. I wonder how different that experience would have been if we’d been told, like I tell my students, that being yourself at work can be your superpower. And that if people won’t take you seriously for wearing pink pants, they’re the problem, not you.
Wait, you’re wondering, don’t women need to change? I thought the gender wage gap was because women do more non-promotable tasks, negotiate less, are more risk averse, and aren’t competitive enough! Research indeed underscores that women show differences in multiple traits compared to men, in a variety of settings, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But none of the literature has demonstrated that the traits women exhibit more than men are actually bad from a profit or productivity perspective.
When I was an eleven-year-old feminist organizing a petition to allow girls to participate in the wrestling unit in gym class alongside the boys (instead of getting stuck with step aerobics!), I would have been furious at the suggestion that girls were any different from boys. Because naturally different felt linked to worse. I didn’t want to be treated any differently just because I was a girl, which really meant I didn’t want to be treated worse: less smart, less capable, less interesting. As an adult feminist and a scientist, I think that while the data points to some average gender differences in traits (in all research on gender differences, we generally see overlapping distributions with different means—there are many women that rate much higher on a “male-type” trait than many men, and vice versa), there is no evidence that the male typical traits are more productive.
Different does not mean worse. Let’s take a look at the science.
Why don’t we spend as much time speculating that male over-competitiveness might be destroying corporate value as we do asking women to change and be more cutthroat?
One classic example of how men’s and women’s traits may differ in ways that impact the workplace is that women tend to be less competitive than men. It might seem intuitive, but for a long time, there was no actual evidence linking being male to increased competition in professional settings. Two experimental economists, Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, changed this.
Niederle and Vesterlund ran an experiment in which they asked men and women to choose how they wanted to be paid for completing a task in the lab (in economics, a room with computers where people—often undergrads—do experiments for pay). For adding up a series of two-digit numbers, participants could be paid via a piece rate (a set sum for each problem they did), or a winner-takes-all competition. Naturally, if you’re a high performer, the potential reward from the tournament-style payment is higher. But if you don’t think of yourself as a top performer, you’re likely to be better off getting paid for each problem you get right. Men and women are equally good at these simple math problems, and thus face the same trade-offs between the compensation schemes. But men are drastically more likely to select the competitive payment scheme than are women. This is true even for women who are in the top group of performance, meaning they are likely to win the competition, and thus they lose out on earnings by forgoing the tournament.
A male colleague mused to me that maybe these results mean it’s “efficient” for there to be fewer women in competitive industries like finance. But here’s the important piece too many people are missing: This canonical paper is titled “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?” and the authors have told me people always forget about that second part of their results. They find that the majority of men in the bottom performance group also choose the competition scheme, even when they would make way more money by simply getting paid the piece rate. In fact, among the lowest-performing men, who are certain to lose, 60 percent choose the tournament. I might want to give the women who were the highest performers but chose the piece rate a little pep talk, sure. But if I’m a manager, they’re not the people I need to be concerned about. I’m much more worried about the men who, having completely flubbed the task, still thought, I got this.
Why don’t we spend as much time speculating that male over-competitiveness might be destroying corporate value as we do asking women to change and be more cutthroat? I think about the quote by Christine Lagarde that if it was “Lehman Sisters instead of Lehman Brothers,” perhaps there wouldn’t have been so much over-indexing on high-risk mortgage securities, and the financial crisis wouldn’t have been as bad.
My own research shows a similar phenomenon in another area where women are often taken to task for not performing as well as men: negotiation. I had heard the refrain that women’s poor negotiation skills were a key part of the gender wage gap so often that I assumed there must be some evidence for it. However, when I looked at the literature, the empirical research supporting this idea was surprisingly thin. So I ran my own experiment with my grad student Jennie Huang.
We paid study participants to come to our lab and participate in a scenario where they negotiated, with a random partner, over a twenty-dollar reward. The catch was that there were only two possible splits: fifteen dollars for one person and five for the other, or vice versa. If a pair couldn’t agree on one of those two unequal divisions, they would both get zero. Because one’s negotiating partner was random, men and women could each be paired with the same gender, or opposite.
Each pair negotiated through computer interface, and then individually entered their share of the split. Naturally, a variety of fierce and creative bargaining ensued, from ultimatums to guilt trips. In the end, we found that men and women, on average, did equally well when they negotiated against one another, poking a hole in the theory that men were naturally more skilled negotiators. But overall, women received more money on average. Why? While women also performed just fine negotiating against other women, when men faced other men, they were substantially more likely to fail to reach an agreement at all, leaving them with a payoff of zero. How much more likely? Two hundred and fifty percent!
Different does not mean worse.
This effect was specifically driven by men who knew they were negotiating against other men—we randomly assigned whether gender was revealed to the other player or not. A man knowing he was bargaining with another man seemed to trigger some unproductive stick measuring. Something as basic as saying “hi” and trying to establish rapport with the other player was linked to higher payoffs, but we found men were less inclined to take this kind of friendly approach against other men. Instead, they were more likely to offer ultimatums, such as: “I’m taking the fifteen dollars, so if you don’t press five dollars for yourself, you’ll get nothing, and I’m not going to talk about it anymore.” Unfortunately, such ultimatums to another man were often met by one right back in return—“No, I’m taking the fifteen dollars and not talking about it anymore!”—and subsequently mismatching. All those zero-dollar payoffs added up and meant male-male pairs earned 20 percent less than any other pair type. As long as there was a woman at the negotiation table, cooler heads seemed to prevail, and some kind of an agreement was reached in almost all cases.
Our experiment showed that women not only weren’t worse at negotiation than men but also that they were better at making sure some kind of mutually beneficial deal was struck, rather than being so rigid that no one ended up with anything. In a professional setting, the cost of such negotiation breakdowns could be enormous—imagine, for example, ending a long-term contract or partnership—and possibly much larger than a failure to get slightly better terms in an agreement. But despite this evidence, I’ve never once heard of corporate seminars for men instructing them on how to negotiate more like women.
In situations where women do accept less at the negotiating table, the possibility remains that they’re tiptoeing around other people’s expectations of them. Researcher Christine Exley, with coauthors, has shown that although women do not actually show more generosity or “social preferences” (preferences toward giving to others or equal outcomes) than men, people consistently believe they will. Perhaps for this reason, when it comes to situations where women know their outcome depends not just on their own preferences but on what others expect of them, we see women act differently. In the fifteen-dollar–five-dollar negotiation game I described, if we don’t let subjects talk to each other first, and they just have to choose blindly whether to claim fifteen dollars for themselves or five dollars, hoping to match their partner’s choice, we find that when players know the other’s gender, women choose the five dollars more often against men, who choose the fifteen dollars more when playing women, leaving women with lower average payoffs. But without this gender information, there’s no such difference. Players know if they don’t choose the same split as their partner, they’ll get nothing. So men and women are not just playing each other, they’re playing each other’s expectations.
Because of this, giving women the advice to “act more like men” is not helpful. Christine Exley teamed up with her mentors Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund to investigate women’s negotiation skills and published the results in a paper called “Knowing When to Ask.” They performed an experiment where participants completed a task, were offered payment by another participant, and then could choose to negotiate their pay. What the researchers found was that when women could choose whether to negotiate, they used the tool of negotiation to increase their profit—opting in to negotiation when they thought it would be profitable, and forgoing it when they thought it wouldn’t be. But when women were forced to negotiate in all cases, they found women’s payoffs drastically reduced. There were no cases where these forced negotiations increased payoffs the women in the “choice” setting had missed—positive negotiation outcomes occurred at exactly the same rate. Instead, all the forced negotiation did was increase the number of times the woman ended the negotiation with a lower payout than the wage she had initially been offered.
All this research offers evidence that women aren’t any less skilled at negotiating than men, and when they choose not to negotiate, it might be a function of skillfully navigating difficult situations where they know they may not be treated equally. In fact, research by Andreas Leibbrandt and John List shows that when women are explicitly told that a salary is negotiable, they negotiate just as much as men. What holds women back from negotiating more proactively is lacking assurance they won’t be penalized for negotiating, not the skill or the will.
So let’s get out of the mindset of telling women they need to change the way they approach work, and start talking about the unique value women bring to the table, how to make sure they’re recognized for it, and what systemically needs to change for us to stop preaching that “nice girls don’t get the corner office,” and instead start building a culture where they do.
Excerpted from Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, by Corinne Low, copyright 2025. Reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books.
